In many video display systems such as TV sets, video enhancement by noise reduction is performed in order to obtain noise-free video sequences for display. Various noise reduction methods have been developed, but few are used in real products because such methods introduce unwanted artifacts into video frames. Most of the conventional noise reduction methods can be classified into three categories: spatial (2D) noise reduction, temporal noise reduction, and 3D noise reduction (i.e., combination of 2D and temporal noise reduction).
Spatial noise reduction applies a filter (with a small local window) to every pixel of the current video frame. Such a filter is usually regarded as a convolution filter based on a kernel. Examples of such a filter are the mean filter, the Gaussian filter, the median filter and the sigma filter. Mean filtering is the simplest, intuitive method for smoothing images and reducing noise, wherein the mean of a small local window is computed as the filtered result. Generally, a 3×3 square kernel is used, simplifying implementation. The mean filter, however, causes severe blurring of images.
Temporal noise reduction first examines motion information among the current video frame and its neighboring frames. It classifies pixels into motion region and non-motion region. In non-motion region, a filter is applied to the pixels in the current frame and its neighboring frames along the temporal axis. In motion region, the temporal filter is switched off to avoid motion blurring. Generally, temporal noise reduction is better in keeping the details and preserving edges than spatial noise reduction. Existing methods, however, introduce tailing effects.